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Lilace Reid Barnes, the daughter of Clifford Barnes (1864-1944) and Alice Reid (1866-1938), was born in 1900 and followed her family's pioneering spirit of generosity throughout her life. Most notably, she accomplished much as first American World President of the YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association) and with also her later involvement at Lake Forest College.
Initially, she began her work with the YWCA in 1926 as a volunteer secretary and soon joined the YWCA national board leading to her eventually rise as the 1947 World President of the International YWCA meeting in China. She held this office in Geneva, Switzerland until 1955. Upon her return to the United States, she was chosen to serve as the head of the YWCA US National Board until 1961 playing a strong role on local, national, and international stages of the organization.

Lilace directly continued to show her propensity for leadership roles as she was the first woman on the Lake Forest College Board Trustees in 1944 and served until 1962. In 1968, she was made an honorary life member and her name holds import on campus at the Lilace Reid Barnes Interfaith Center and with the donation of Reid Barnes collection to the Library Archives and Special Collections. She died in Lake Forest at the age of 89 in 1989.

Edward Herbert Bennett (1874-1954) was born in southwestern England the son of a clipper ship’s master and was educated in Bristol schools before coming to the U.S. in 1890, to California where after trying ranching he found employment in architectural offices. There he came to the attention of notable architect Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957), who arranged for him to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, funded by Phoebe Hearst (1842-1919; Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California), ca. 1898-1902. Another protégé of Maybeck’s and Hearst’s, and friend of Bennett’s was Arthur Brown, Jr. (1874-1957), who also graduated from the Ecole, in 1901 and returned to California to practice. A notable work of Brown’s is Stanford’s iconic Hoover Tower (1941). Brown also worked with Bennett on the Federal Triangle, Washington, DC. Bennett, like Brown, received his Ecole diplome, a relatively unusual achievement for students from the U.S.

Bennett took two major Mediterranean trips focused on architecture, one ca. 1900-01 and another in 1910. For the first there is a small group of photos recording this trip with at least one Ecole friend. For the second, to Egypt with his sister Helen, there is both a larger photo album collection and a travel diary.

After a brief stint in the offices of architect George B. Post (1837-1913) in New York, Ecole friend and Chicago Burnham design partner W. Peirce Anderson (1870-1924) recommended him to Daniel Burnham to assist on a West Point competition plan. Though not successful in winning the contract there, Burnham took him on to work on a plan of San Francisco, 1905. By 1905-06, though, Burnham was urging Bennett to leave his adopted home state of California and promotion of that Plan to return to Chicago to take up work by 1906-07 on a plan for Chicago, published in 1909, the Plan of Chicago. On the Plan Bennett worked closely with French artists and Ecole comrades Jules Guerin and Fernand Janin (1880-1912), the latter the artist of a portrait of Bennett as a student; another American Ecole (Paris) five-year alum Carl F. Gould (1873-1939); Plan editor Charles Moore (also later Burnham’s biographer, 1921), and Plan chair Charles Dyer Norton, also a Lake Forest College neighbor (550 E. Deerpath) and College trustee (1903-11) responsible for the 1906 campus plan.

Bennett started his own national practice, after 1910. Early work included a Portland (Oregon) plan and a lakefront plan for Lake Forest (Illinois), 1911. Bennett served as consulting architect for the Chicago Plan Commission, 1913-30. He designed the 1920 Michigan Avenue bridge (conceived as two levels during the 1907-09 process), Grant Park and the 1920s Buckingham Fountain, thus fulfilling some of the 1909 Plan’s projected key features. From 1927 to 1937 he led work on the Washington, DC, Plan, and in particular the Federal Triangle. From the late 1920s through the early 1930s he played a leading role in the 1933-34 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, responsible for the design of several buildings in the new French version of International style, Art Deco, and reflecting the influence of Le Courbusier in this country then.

Bennett led partnerships after practicing on his own: Bennett and Parsons, 1919-22; Bennett Frost and Thomas, 1922-24; and Bennett Parsons and Frost, 1924-38. Through the 1920s the City of Lake Forest outsourced its planning work to local resident Bennett’s firm, with its first zoning ordinance, 1923, and creation of a Plan Commission in 1929; Bennett served as the inaugural Lake Forest Plan Commission’s first chair with a five-year term (records, AIC Burnham Library). He closed his practice in 1944.

Bennett had arrived in Lake Forest in 1906, attending events, etc. at Onwentsia, joined the club and was a summer resident in 1907, and married Catherine Jones in 1912, daughter of capitalist and Lake Forest University/College board of trustees president David B. Jones, 1903-04 (trustee 1896-1915; secretary 1896-98). The couple built their home Bagatelle on the southwest corner of Deerpath and Green Bay Road, 1915-16, to Bennett’s designs, including garden planting plans. This was a corner of David B. Jones’ estate and near his home, Pembroke Lodge (1895, Henry Ives Cobb). In the same period Bennett designed the landscape and gardens of Jones’ villa Pepper Hill (1916, David Adler) at Montecito, Santa Barbara, CA. In 1930 he also built for himself in his garden a new brick studio, in the International Style he employed in his Century of Progress work.

Catherine Jones Bennett died in the 1925 and he remarried, Olive Holden Mead. The Bennett family beginning in the 1930s enjoyed a farm in present-day Mettawa, west of Lake Forest and Ghost Ranch, in the southwest, where Edward H. Bennett designed an adobe home. In his last decade he built a retirement home in Tryon, North Carolina (Paul Schwieckher [1903-1997], ca. 1948-49; landscape by Bennett), and he pursued his work with watercolors, which he had employed as a student and on the 1909 Plan.

Edward and Catherine Bennett had one son, Edward H. Bennett, Jr., a Harvard-educated architect and planner, the founding president in 1976 of the Lake Forest Foundation for Historic Preservation. For his Harvard thesis EHB, Jr. designed and International Style union railroad terminal for west of the Chicago River, in the mode of the 1960 Naess & Murphy O’Hare Field air terminal. Among EHB, Jr.’s residential designs is a 1957 International Style house for George and Rosemary D. Hale, 270 Butler Dr., Lake Forest, in the mode of the Lemke house (1932) by Mies van der Rohe and 1940s and 1950s houses by Philip Johnson (Lemke house photos and Johnson material in Schulze collection; Hale house plans in the library’s Hale collection).

Edward H. Bennett, Jr.’s one son and also only child, Edward H. Bennett III, is a Lake Forest College alumnus, Class of 1971; he was president of the Lake Forest Foundation for Historic Preservation, 1999-2001. Edward H. Bennett III’s older son, Christopher E. Bennett, also is an alumnus, Class of 1992, and he resides in Chicago. Mr. Bennett’s younger son, Timothy R. Bennett, AIA, ALA, carries on the family architectural tradition and resides in Highland Park.

In 1953, in the year prior to his 1954 passing, Edward H. Bennett donated a large collection of his papers, largely professional materials, to the Burnham Library, Art Institute of Chicago. The remaining papers, photos, etc. stayed in EHB Jr.’s house (the former Jones stable block) on the 1895 Jones compound to 2004, when they were transferred to EHB III’s house further west on Deerpath in Lake Forest. Much of this family archive relating to EHB’s work on the 1909 Plan of Chicago and subsequent planning career made up the body of this 2008 donation.

Nancy A. Nichols, Boston, MA, and from Waukegan, IL, where she grew up, has been an editor and author of articles and books. In addition to Lake Effect..., she edited Reach for the Top: Women and the Changing Facts of work Life (Boston: Harvard Business Review, 1994). She has written articles for many national periodical and newspaper publications.

Third Children of James G.K. McClure and Phebe Ann McClure (Dixon)
Wife of R. Douglas Stuart
Mother of Robert D. Stuart Jr. (Bob), Anne Stuart (Batchelder), Margaret Stuart (Hart), Harriet Stuart (Spencer)

Son of Robert and Margaret Jane (Sharrar) Stuart
Brother of John Stuart and Margaret (Stuart) McDonald
Husband of Harriet (McClure) Stuart
Father of Robert D. Jr. or "Bob," Anne, Margaret, and Harriet Stuart
Served as a Major with the American Red Cross during World War I
Chairman of Quaker Oats and US Ambassador to Canada 1953

Son of R. Douglas and Harriet (McClure) Stuart
Husband of Barbara McMath Edwards (d. 1993) and later Lillan Lovenskiold
Father of 5 Children
Chief/Chairman of Quaker Oats and US Ambassador to Norway 1984

Clifford W. Barnes was a clergyman and sociologist born in Corry, PA on October 8, 1864. He was an accomplished student attending both University of California and Oxford University (England) and graduating from of Yale University. He also received a Masters degree from University of Chicago. He began his career as a pastor in New York City and Chicago. Importantly, he became the first male resident of the Hull House, Chicago, in 1893.

Alongside his church work in Chicago, Barnes traveled throughout Europe to places within England and France to learn and teach in schools. He pursued such a course of teaching to closely examine the differing definitions of morality held worldwide. He soon returned to the United States to teach sociology at UIC for a year and he married Alice Reid on May 5, 1898. Clifford and Alice became parents of a son Summerville Reid, who died in early childhood and of a daughter, Lilace.

Clifford Barnes was later officially appointed as President and professor of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1900. Yet, Barnes always chose to devoted his energies to many social movements and held a number of organizational positions/titles. One of best known group created by Clifford was the well known Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

Alfred S. Austrian was born in Chicago June 15, 1870, the son of Solomon and Julia Austrian. He was a Harvard graduate, 1891, and was admitted to the bar, Chicago, in 1893. He married Mamie Rothschild October 1, 1901.

Gayle Kenney Dompke (June 15, 1937-November 19, 2012) graduated from Northwestern University in 1958, and in 1968 graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also earned her law degree from John Marshall Law School in 1984. She married Richard Dompke, Northhwestern Class of 1955, in 1956.

Mrs. Dompke was an early and active member of the 1972-founded Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, after moving to Lake Forest in 1973, and serving on the Historic Sites Committee. She served as a board member and as the second president, 1978-80. During her two-year presidency, again folllowing Mr. Dompke's account, "the process of preparing a Historic Preservation Ordinance began, along with identifying historic properties and districts, which were considered eligible for historic designation."

Mrs. Dompke's Kirscht ancestors, original settlers of Niles Center just east of Evanston and Lake Michigan, led to her active work with the Skokie Historical Society, as well. She served as secretary of the Society, and she organized and prepared to be transferred to the State Archives Niles Township records.

This photo archive stems from her work documenting photographically significant Lake Forest structures, estates and their houses, Market Square and the business district, and the College's campus.

J. Howard Wood, who died in 1988 at the age of eighty-seven, was president and CEO of the Tribune Company from 1960 to 1968, and chairman, 1966-70.

Wood began his relationship with the Chicago Tribune as a delivery boy at age 11, Canton, Illinois. He graduated from Lake Forest College in 1922, attended graduate school in English at Harvard, and then taught in a prep school before joining the Tribune as a reporter in 1925.

Working in the paper's financial area, he rose to lead that section, to turn his skills to financial management at the Tribune under long-time publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick, and then five years after McCormick's death in 1955 to become publisher and corporate leader of the Tribune Company.

Wood is credited with building the Tribune Company into a modern media firm, following the lead of Colonel Robert McCormick who had embraced radio in the 1920s. Under Wood, WGN-TV built a new Chicago headquarters and other stations were added as well.

He married Ruth Hendrickson in 1928, a 1921 Lake Forest College graduate. The Woods lived in east-central Lake Bluff after 1940, and raised their family there.

Susan Dart McCutcheon was the spouse of John T. McCutcheon, Jr., former editor of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial page and after he retired the Tribune Co. archivist in the 1980s. After raising her family in Lake Forest, Susan Dart, the name she wrote under, produced a natural foods and cooking syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune (1976-81), wrote a “Forest Ranger” column for the Lake Forester, and several books in the 1980s and 1990s. Along with advocating for healthy diets, she was active in saving from demolition the 1899 Lake Forest City Hall. She moved to North Carolina with her husband in the late 1980s while returning locally summers in the 1990s.

As she described in her partly autobiographical study of her brother, architect Edward Dart, Susan Dart was a native of New Orleans. She later graduated from Connecticut College. She met her husband, a young Navy officer and son of the eminent Chicago political cartoonist and author John T. McCutcheon, in New Orleans in the early 1940s. They married in 1943 and moved to Lake Forest in 1947, living in a cottage on the Aldis Compound on Illinois Road, near Green Bay Road, called Bird Cottage, which has since been demolished.

In the 1950s Susan Dart McCutcheon raised a family and moved into, on a west Lake Forest prairie setting, a new brick ranch style home (W. Laurel Ave., demolished) designed by her modernist architect brother, Edward Dart. Perhaps partly due to her southern origins, though she was social she never considered herself a socialite, according to her daughter Anne McCutcheon Lewis as reported in her Chicago Tribune obituary, December 16, 2007(author Trevor Jensen). She belonged to Onwentsia in Lake Forest and to Chicago’s Friday Club. In 1963 she received a master’s in English from Northwestern University, and she then taught at Ferry Hall (now merged into Lake Forest Academy) and Barat College.

Her local column, “Forest Ranger,” for the local Lake Forester in the early 1970s was succeeded by her syndicated “Natural Foods” column from 1976 to 1981. In these later columns she crusaded for healthy eating based on foods not contaminated by little-understood and potentially-harmful chemicals. Through her accessible writings about practical recipes she showed the way for individuals to take control of a major way that the environment affects their lives. Her carefully put together collection of these columns, with an index, suggests that she may have considered putting them together as a book.

By this time she had moved on, from 1980 to 1997, to write books of family, local, architectural and organizational history that remain essential sources. These are:

Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon and Ragdale. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1980).

Market Square. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1984).

Friday Club: The First Hundred Years, 1887-1987. (Chicago; the Club, 1987).

Supplement to Edward Arpee, Lake Forest, Illinois: History and Reminiscences, 1861-1961. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1991).

Edward Dart, Architect. (Evanston: Evanston Publishing, 1993).

The Old Home Place. (Louisville, KY: Chicago Spectrum Press, 1997).

The first book, only 29 pp., Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon and Ragdale(1980), was also the first book published about Ragdale, a decade prior to Alice Hayes and Susan Moon, Ragdale: A History and Guide(Open Books and the Ragdale Foundation, 1990). This pamphlet preserved lore about her mother-in-law and her family and the family compound, Ragdale, by then housing the Ragdale Foundation(founded 1976 by Alice Hayes) in Shaw’s 1897 completed English Arts & Crafts summer home.

This book about the Shaw family and Ragdale led into the second book as Susan Dart delved further into the work of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw and his arguably most notable project, Market Square(1916), the model for all subsequent shopping centers. For her work on Shaw she mounted a campaign to document photographically as much of Shaw’s local (Lake Forest, Chicago) work as possible and she engaged volunteer and professional photographers including Barbara Wood-Prince, Bert Congdon, Jean McMasters Grost, and others (available in Special Collections).

Disappointed in the physical presentation of her first book, she took control of the production of Market Square (1984). She engaged book producer Frank Williams and also eminent book designer R. Hunter Middleton, both of Chicago, to create an appropriately respectful form for her study of Shaw’s significant 1916 first and model shopping center. She accompanied review of the project’s history and architecture with a biographical sketch of the architect. Once this was published she donated her Shaw and architecture material, along with the production and design records with Williams and Middleton, respectively, here in Special Collections, 1984. Also included were other local materials and photographs, including 1907-08 Onwentsia horse show stereo views identified by her late mother-in-law, Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon. Deposited the year after the Donnelley Library opened its first Special Collections reading room and new closed stacks in 1983, this became a major building block of the College library’s Special Collections of local materials (architect Shaw having also designed seven campus buildings).

Dart’s next project was writing the centennial history of her Friday Club, Chicago, an early women’s club that met monthly. This was updating a 1937 semi-centennial book. She followed this project with another updating, this time the informally prepared and documented 1960s town history by Edward Arpee, also the author of a 1944 History of Lake Forest Academy and a 1953 biography of Admiral William Moffett, From Frigates to Flattops…. Arpee’s history had relied on the recollections of various old settlers, mostly from his spouse Katherine Trowbridge’s Durand family and their friends. For her 1991 Supplement to Arpee’s 1960s town history, Dart corralled more recollections to amend and add to the information in the original book. The Supplement was both printed separately and as a continuation for a 1991 reprinting of the whole work.

Her 1993 biographical and architectural study of her brother Edward Dart also included material about her own New Orleans origins. But it is a very useful contribution to the study of modern architecture, through the preparation and career of one notable Chicago-based exemplar who died in 1975. Many of Dart’s buildings are significant, including his St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, IL, and his Water Tower Place, Chicago, the largest concrete building built to that time, when Dart was a partner in the Lloebl Schlossman firm. Dart also designed the 1968 Lake Forest College Sports Center, remarkable for its fitting over 70,000 sq. ft. of programmed space into a self-effacing, low-profile structure that was compatible with its residential neighborhood context on Sheridan Road. (The Dart structure was substantially expanded to the north in 2010.) The book includes a catalog listing with small photos of all of Edward Dart’s known works.

Her last book was about her new home in western North Carolina. By the late 1980s she and her spouse were spending their winters near the Smokey Mountains in a beautiful rustic setting. She assembled all she’d learned and come to love there in her 1997 book, the Old Home Place.

During the period of Dart’s pursuit of material on Shaw and Market Square, she also stepped in to fight against demolition of the 1899-completed City Hall itself part of the architectural context that shaped the nearby Market Square design by Shaw.

Dart also devoted attention to finding good archival homes for Shaw and McCutcheon family papers and memorabilia, working with her mother-in-law, Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon, to deposit McCutcheon and Shaw papers at the Chicago Historical Society, now Chicago History Museum; at the Newberry Library; at the Lake Forest (town) Library; and the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). Many books from Shaw’s and McCutcheon’s libraries gravitated here also, as they proved redundant or otherwise inappropriate elsewhere. Shaw architectural scrapbooks created by the family and deposited at the AIC were filmed by the College library in the 1980s (through the U. of Chicago library’s photo reproduction studio), when they could not be accessed there due to condition issues; Paul Myers of Marktown, East Chicago, IN, later printed from these a multi-volume set of Shaw’s notebooks. A medallion of Shaw by Sylvia Shaw Judson, the architect’s sculptor daughter, given by Susan Dart to Paul Myers, was cast in plaster for this library by Myers</a>. When Dart and her husband finally left their Lake Forest home, they also donated other collections, perhaps most notably John T. McCutcheon’s pirate and Caribbean books, relating to his long-time interest in the topic and his island, Salt Key, Bahamas (see the senior McCutcheon’s 1950 memoir,Drawn From Memory).

Lake Forest College Alumnus 1927, He participated in basketball, baseball and football. A double-major in physics and history, and a member of Phi Delta Theta.
Served in the US Navy and was the Director of the U.S. Chess Team Federation, Organizer of the Junior Class Tournament and president of the North Shore Chess League.
Received the Distinguished Service Award and an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Lake Forest College.
Worked in Illinois Bell Telephone Co. as a business research administrator and had an Masters in Statistics from Northwestern University
Nephew to Cornelia Neltnor and Grandson to Mr. and Mrs. John C. Neltnor
Married to Muriel Barnes Asmann (d. 1965) and later Alice Thompson Asmann
Printed Author on subjects of Telephone History and Mathematics

Bertram A. Weber was born in Chicago, Illinois to Peter, an architect, and Bertha (nee Werkmeister) Weber. Weber enrolled at Northwestern University in 1916. With America's involvement in World War I growing, Weber put his studies on hold in 1918 to enter naval training. Soon after the armistice, he began work at his father’s architectural firm, remaining there eight months, after which he went back to school to pursue a bachelor's degree in architecture. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with this degree in 1922.

Fresh out of school, Weber worked a short time for Howard Van Doren Shaw. However, after his father’s death in 1923, Weber joined the family firm and along with Charles White formed White & Weber in 1924. Weber married Dorothea (nee Brammer) in 1928. They had two children, son John and daughter Dorie. After Charles White’s death in 1936 Weber began to practice independently, simply known as Bertram A. Weber, architect. In 1973 when his son joined him in his practice, Weber & Weber was formed.

Weber's career spanned almost 65 years, during which time he worked on a diversity of public, private residential, and commercial projects. Weber retired in 1987. He died two years later in 1989 in Pompano Beach, Florida.

Edward Arpee (1899-1979), the brother of Armenian historian and theologian Leon Arpee, was a career (over thirty-five years, beginning ca. 1929) professor at Lake Forest Academy. He was the spouse of Katherine Trowbridge Arpee (granddaughter of Chicago wholesale grocer and later LF resident Calvin Durand), and father of Harriet Sherman of Lake Bluff. Arpee graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote various notable books, including "History of Lake Forest Academy" (Chicago: Alderbrink Press, 1944) and "From Frigates to Flat Tops" (1953).

The Arpees lived at 383 N. Washington Road, less than a block from the Academy, and about a block south of Mrs. Arpee's parents' home on College Road. According to the Apree's, the home was once a summer rental property for Onwentsia residents when it was owned by Van Weganen Alling. One of the past renters was Adlai Stevenson, who later built his farm in Libertyville.

Sources:

"Senior master Publishes an Historical Documentary," Spectator [Lake Forest Academy], April 20, 1964, 1.

Biographical Details gathered by, Arthur H. Miller Archivist & Librarian for Special Collections